Our ‘Cold Civil War’

By James G. Wiles

American Thinker

Angelo M. Codevilla has written an important article in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books. The piece is generating a lot of attention. It should.

Codevilla sharpens — and amplifies — an argument American Thinker has been making since January 10.

Angelo M. Codevilla is a retired professor of international relations at Boston University. Apart from his wide-ranging (and voluminous) academic writings, Dr. Cordevilla publishes frequently in Commentary, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and the The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

“The 2016 election and its aftermath,” Codevilla writes, “reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America’s ruling class and the rest of the country.” He elaborates:

“The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves. Ever since Woodrow Wilson nearly a century and a half ago at Princeton, colleges have taught that ordinary Americans are rightly ruled by experts because they are incapable of governing themselves. Millions of graduates have identified themselves as the personifiers of expertise and believe themselves entitled to rule. Their practical definition of discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, etc., is neither more nor less than anyone’s reluctance to bow to them. It’s personal. “

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